Blog

The Most Important Number in America Is Learning Readiness at Age Four

The most important number in
America for our future as a country is the percentage of our children from
every group who are learning ready at age four.

We will be badly damaged as a country
if we do not reduce the learning gaps in our schools.

The learning gaps in our high schools today across the
country are huge — and those gaps have not closed in 20 years. We have fewer
than 40 percent of our students who are able to read at grade level in high
school today — and the total number of students in our schools who cannot read
is growing every year.

Canada has more than 80 percent of their students reading at
grade level.

We should and could have learning levels in our schools that
are as good or better than the levels in Canada. But that higher level of
learning will not happen for us as a country until we change a couple of things
that we do for our children before they actually get to school.

We all need to understand the extremely important fact that
those damaging learning gaps are not created by our schools.

Those gaps are created by the direct interactions each of our
children have with their world in those first key years for each child before
they actually get to school.

We all need to know and understand that those major learning
gaps in our schools are created by the fact that only a very small percentage
of our children are actually learning ready when they arrive at their first day
of kindergarten.

Far too many of our children are not ready to learn in an
academic setting at that point in time because the learning support process that
all children need to build neuron connections in their brain did not start and
happen in those very first key years for each child.

The neuron connection process that builds our brains actually
starts at birth for each child. Connections that are built for life are based
very directly and immediately on the interactions each child has with their
world in those first
weeks, months and years of life.

The children who are not learning ready on their first day
of school start behind the kids who actually are learning ready at that point
in their lives — and we know from 30 years of data and we know from clear and
painful experience in thousands of schools across the country that the children
who start behind at that point in their education process overwhelmingly stay
behind for their entire educational lives.

Those students who start kindergarten behind other children
and who are not sufficiently ready to learn at that very important and very
early point in their lives do not catch up.

That is a painful, sad, jarring, shocking, unpleasant,
unpopular, functionally important, but sometimes anger-provoking and sometimes politically
unfortunate and politically incorrect thing to say in a number of settings for
many understandable reasons — but we now have 30 years of extremely consistent failure
in closing our school learning gaps in multiple well-intentioned programs in
schools across the country to prove beyond question that it is substantively
and consistently true.

We have failed to close those significant gaps in our
schools for a very long time and we need to recognize that we will not close
them now or ever by continuing to do what we have been doing in all of those
schools and hoping that the outcome will be different in the future because we
really want a different outcome to happen.

That process and that reality can now be changed for us as a
country.

We finally have information that can lead us to a future
where those learning gaps do not exist in all of those schools.

Knowledge is power.

We have knowledge now that can give us the power and the
ability to create a better future for our country and for our children. We
finally understand exactly why we have failed to close those gaps in all of
those schools and settings and we finally know what we can do to change that
reality for us as a country.

Neurons matter.

Neuron connections in the brain of each child determine
which path each child is on.

We now have a much better understanding of that reality about
neuron connections and we know now how to use that information to help each of
our children.

We finally understand that those decades of failure to close
the learning gaps in our schools are the result of relative neuron connection
levels in the brain of our children and our failures to close those gaps are
not the result of things that are being done in all of those settings by our
schools or by the teachers and staff in our schools.

Brain development processes in the first weeks, first months,
and first years of life for each child build neuron connections by the billions
in the brains of our children.

Those processes that build connections in brains are the same
for all sets of children. The children who have the most connections built in
the first months and years of life use those connections to support their
learning processes for life and those children stay ahead of the children who
have had fewer neurons connected in the first months and years of their life.

Biology is destiny for each child.

Biological destiny is set in a very functional and very
personal way at a very early age for each child.

Age four is an important year.

The children who are ahead of other children by age four
stay ahead of the children who have fallen behind by age four for very basic
biological reasons.

They don’t stay ahead because they are better people and or
because they work harder at brain growth or learning than other students in
their kindergarten or school or because they are more committed to learning at
some ethical or philosophical level. They stay ahead because they have billions
of additional neuron connections in their brains at that point in time and the
major opportunity for neuron growth for all children from every group happens
in the first weeks, months and years of life for each child.

Our growing awareness and understanding of the relevant
biological processes and time frames now teach us that the brains of children
from every group change just before age four and that opportunity to make those
neuron connections in those ways at those levels diminishes significantly at
that time in their life.

The biology and those key biological time frames are the
same for all children and they are the same for every group of children. The
opportunities to connect billions and even trillions of neurons are the same
for each group of children in those first days, weeks, months, and years of
life.

To make the situation functionally more difficult for each
child who has fallen behind in those first three years, each child’s brain actually
begins to purge itself of unused neuron connections at that point in time. That
purging process is needed for the brain of each child to organize itself — but
one unfortunate consequence of that time frame is that the children who have
fallen behind by the time the brain begins that purging process simply do not
have the functional and biological opportunity to fully catch up later.

Everyone who cares about the future of our children and the
future of our country need to understand the significance of those processes
and time frames. Pathways and life trajectories are put into play in those time
frames for every child. Those can be very negative trajectories for too many
children. That extremely important combination of brain development factors
tends to create major difficulties for the children who have fallen behind at
that point in their lives.

There continue to be opportunities to make neuron
connections in the brain for every person after that point, but the opportunity
to make the vast number of connections that enhance basic learning for each
child is no longer in place after age four.

The fact that we have numbers of people who have fallen
behind by that age does not mean that we should give up on any children
regardless of how well they have done up to that point.

We need to help everyone.

We need to do everything we can to create the best and most
useful education experience for every child after age four regardless of their
neuron connection capacity at age four or five. Education offers value and
benefit to every child — regardless of the level of neuron connections that a
child built in the first key years when those connections happen so easily for
each child.

We need to know, understand and appreciate the fact that
education for everyone after that point can make all children better informed,
wiser, more emotionally grounded and secure, more capable and more knowledgeable
on multiple levels and we should do our best as parents and as educators to
help each and every child benefit from the foundation of their own lives and from
their own ability to learn at every age.

But we need to recognize and understand that the key and
wonderful opportunity that has existed since the moment of birth to build an
exploding number of neuron connections in each child’s brain is no longer in
place and is not happening in the same way after that very early point in time
for each child.

It is much more difficult to help children with those
aspects of their brain strength and capability after age four.

Almost No One Knew That
Those Processes and Time Frames Affect Each and Every Child

We have been ignorant as a society about those key processes
and time frames.

That functional reality and that very functionally useful
understanding about the fact that those brain development time frames and
processes exist for each child and the awareness that those universal
biological processes very directly and individually shape the life of each and
every child in those critical time frames is actually relatively new
information for us as a country.

Sadly — almost no one in our communities, or our families or
our schools who should have known that information actually knew that extremely
important information at any useful level until very recently.

A relatively few people in our research settings actually have
had a high and growing level of awareness and knowledge of those issues and
processes at earlier levels for some years — and The Institute of Medicine
actually wrote a wonderful piece called “From Neurons To
Neighborhoods” that outlined the whole process over a decade ago — but
that information did not even get in even a vague and generic way to most
caregivers for children and families in America and it has not guided our
educational policy or our resource allocations as a country in any useful ways.

That absolutely foundational and extremely important information
about our children did not reach our education people or our public policy
thinkers or our relevant decision makers at any level that influenced either
our policies or our behaviors.

Sadly and very dysfunctionally as a public policy reality, the
researchers who actually did have that knowledge in a number of research
programs and settings wrote great research papers on those topics but they did
not teach what they knew about the huge importance of the first months and
years of life for brain growth in any organized, deliberate, intentional,
effectively publicized way to the people in our society and our communities who
could have used that information in many effective ways to help our children in
the last decades.

Because of that failure to share and teach that information to
all relevant parties in intentional ways, the vast majority of key people in
our education world and in our public policy development processes who should
have known that extremely important and foundational information simply did not
know it.

Some people in some research settings who knew that
information chose not to share it outside of academic settings because they did
not want to be perceived to be either critical or judgmental relative to
anyone’s approach to parenting.

That ignorance on those processes has done highly
unintentional damage to large numbers of people.

Disparities between groups have resulted from that
information not being shared in effective and useful ways with everyone who
should have known it.

We have a wide range of economic and functional and sometimes
even legal inter group disparities and inter group discrimination and prejudice
factors that have been getting worse for a number of groups in our country.

We have major disparities in income levels, economic status
levels, education levels and employment levels — between groups — and none of
the people who have been looking at those disparities have had any clue about
the fact that a number of those disparities are deeply and directly anchored in
these very basic and universal early childhood neuron connection processes for
our various groups of children as part of their core functionality and
causality.

The issues and links can be extremely practical and
painfully obvious once they are perceived to exist.

It is much harder to do well economically without a job and
it is much harder to get a job and make a living if you can’t read or do
calculations and if you have dropped out of school.

We should make a commitment to address some of those
disparities in all of those areas by creating a high level of learning
readiness at age four for every child that will put people from every group on
a much better path for education, employment, and health.

We Need Universal Knowledge
About Neuron Connectivity Processes and Time Frames for All Relevant People

Everyone needs to understand these processes and opportunities.

We need to share the most important and useful information
about brain development and neuron connections in the first weeks and months of
life for each child with everyone who should know it — and we need to share it
with all relevant people in clear and effective ways now so it can begin to
affect the lives of children who are being born today.

This is the perfect time to be sharing that information.

The science that supports those opportunities is getting
better every day.

The underlying science for brain development of children is
moving into a golden age. Brilliant people in multiple settings are exploding and
expanding the science of childhood development to amazing new levels. The truth
is that we are seeing an explosion in that brain development science for
children today in multiple research settings and those new learnings in all of
those settings about brain development and emotional growth in children actually
dwarf all of our previous knowledge about those issues.

We know more than we have ever known about what
developmental processes are exploding in the brains of our children in the
first weeks, months and years of life and what we are learning is giving us
information that can transform the lives of children and change life trajectories
for large numbers of people in extremely positive ways when we use that
information to help our children.

We need to change the fact that no one is teaching that
information effectively to either parents or educators and we need to use that
information in organized and effective ways in every community to save and
redirect our failing schools.

We knew that we were not closing the learning gaps in our
schools because that data about communities not closing those learning gaps is
public and painfully obvious. But we did not know as a society and we did not
know as educators or as communities why we were failing at making those gaps disappear,
so we did not do things to remedy those situations and problems.

Neuron connection processes start early — and we need to use
that information early in each life to help every child.

Early is early. Some key processes actually start a bit
before birth. Some very promising research is even beginning now to reach back
in a number of settings into both pre-birth development situations and to pre-birth
processes for each child.

We need to feel a sense of urgency about those time frames,
now that we have a better sense of the changes that happen for each child after
year three and now that we recognize why all of those programs that have worked
so hard to help children who have fallen behind to catch up have had such
unfortunate results.

We need everyone to know and understand that brain
development changes that happen in every child from every group at age four
will keep children older than four years old from developing the billions
of neuron connections in their brain that will allow them to catch
up with the children who developed more extensive connections in the first
months and years of their life.

Knowing that catching up is functionally impossible for far
too many children after the opportunity for those first years has passed is
grim, unfortunate, powerful, painful, often disliked, and extremely useful
information that we all need to have in order to do the right things with each
and every child born in America to make learning gaps disappear now for our
schools and for our children.

We need to use that information to cause us to put support processes
in place that create learning readiness levels for every child in those time
frames when we can offer the most benefit for each child.

We Have Many More Children
Being Born Into the Low End of The Learning Gap

We need to deal with this problem now — because it is
getting worse.

This is not a static situation or a simple extension of our
old problems in that area. The unfortunate reality we face now is that our learning
gaps in our schools will be damaging more people and will be damaging more people
in even more ways in our country because we have significantly larger numbers
of people being born into settings with lower achievement levels.

We need people to take a clear eyed and honest look at what
is happening in many of our communities because the situation is getting worse
in many settings and the long-term consequences of having fewer people who are
learning will be very damaging at multiple levels.

We have a growing number of schools where fewer than 20
percent of the children can read at grade level at age 15 and we have some
schools where less than 15 percent of the students in some groups are either
reading at grade level or doing mathematical computations at grade level.

The consequences of those learning gaps will shape our
future as a country and it will put multiple communities onto a path of future
economic failure and into a future of growing inter group anger, conflict and
division.

We are now seeing large numbers of children who will not be
able to do calculations or read at age 15, and that will result in people with
those problems not being employable and it will result in large numbers of
people having major health problems and going to prison.

We disproportionately send high school drop outs from all
groups to prison. The percentage of African American Males who have dropped out
of school and who are in their 30s and who are in prison now exceeds 60
percent.

That compares to roughly 10 percent of African American
males in their 30s who graduated from high school who are in prison.

We imprison more people than any other country in the world
by a wide margin — with seven times more people in prison per capita than
Canada — and we disproportionally imprison both minority Americans and people
who have dropped out of school.

Age four sets the pathway and trajectory for those children.
The path to jail begins at age four for too many children.

We know that to be true, because we can now predict with a
high level of accuracy which of our students is headed for not being able to
read in high school and who will be on a high likelihood path to being
imprisoned based on their learning readiness levels at age four.

To change that pathway to both prison and to not being
employable, we need to what we need to do to help all children connect neurons
by the billions in those first weeks, months and years of life so that our high
schools are a time of learning and not a time of punishment and incarceration
for those children.

The Percentage of Children Who
Are Learning Ready at Age Four Is a Very Important Number and Should Be a
National Goal and Priority

Age four is a key age and a key time for all of those
processes.

That process and that developmental reality for our children
is why the percentage of children in our country who are learning ready at age
four is actually the single most important number in American education today.

It is also why the percentage of children in every community
who are learning ready at age four is extremely important for us as a society
at multiple levels.

The percentage of children who are learning ready by age
four will functionally determine future levels of employment and that
percentage will create job capability realities for our national workforce.

Our aging population requires us to have learning ready
people in very large numbers. We will need someone to do our work as our
population ages and we will need and want people to be both caretakers and
taxpayers for future years.

That number of children who are learning ready at age four will
obviously determine whether we will have taxpayers in the future who be able to
keep our Social Security and Medicare programs funded, or whether we will find
those programs to be in even more financial trouble than they are now.

We want people to be taxpayers — not felons. We now know
that age four is actually a highly functional cross roads point in life that
will help determine which of those roles each person will be in for their adult
lives.

To have a good future as a nation, we need to do whatever we
need to do now to help guide people down the learning capability path to
paychecks instead of prison. We can only close the learning gaps and get people
headed for paychecks instead of prison if we focus on the years before age four
and if we give every child the right sets of interactions to have neuron
connectivity happening in those key months and years.

We need to recognize how important that topic is to us as a
country and how big the problem of learning gaps deficiencies for growing
numbers of people is now.

We prefer to hide from the issue in most settings — and many
of our leaders have strongly preferred to pretend that those learning gaps do not
exist as a threat or a reality or to ignore them entirely as leaders. The
numbers relative to those performance levels by our students in all of those
schools cannot be debated, denied or accurately refuted — but they can clearly
be ignored or even hidden by people who want to avoid dealing with them.

Many people from many groups and communities try hard to
avoid looking at the actual and current learning gap numbers for our schools
and some even refuse to talk about them when they are reported because most of
our leaders do not have any useful way of discussing the issues.

Our news media usually tries not to write or talk about any
of the learning gap issues — and when the annual reports about the learning
gaps in our schools are made public, our media generally runs weakly
constructed and poorly written stories that celebrate any tiny improvements that
happen in learning gaps in any setting from year to year without being clear
about the context for those numbers or discussing their implications for any
group or setting.

The pattern is that local newspapers tend not to want to
high lite or describe their local community low learning performance levels — and
the pattern we see is that the other news media in each setting usually completely
skips the story about local learning gaps entirely every year.

So we do not have an informed public on those issues.

The annual learning gap information for all of our school
settings is both undisputed and available — but it is not used or discussed in
any public ways in most settings.

Schools, in particular, are often not happy about having the
learning gap closure failures pointed out every year, and many frustrated
school leaders try to present the data for their schools in ways that create at
least the illusion of progress on at least some part of the situation.

Most schools have no idea that their learning gaps were
created by the learning readiness problems for their students in the first
three years of life, so they do not mention that data or explain the process. Many
schools have tutors, special programs, various kinds of group and individual
coaching, and a wide variety of extremely well intentioned and sometimes well
publicized attempts to close the gaps, but the annual reporting about those
programs for a couple of decades has been that all of those good-hearted
programs have failed to make the gaps disappear or meaningfully shrink in all
of those settings.

Look at the reading scores for the schools in whatever city
you are in. There are huge gaps everywhere with very low scores for growing
numbers of students on the low ends of the gaps. And you can see that clearly
from the reports.

Look at each community and look at each group in each community.

We are not doing well as a nation on that agenda. Having
less than Forty percent of our students able to read at grade level is a
frightening number, and it is getting worse.

The painful reality is that we have growing groups of
children in many of our communities who have as few as 20 and 30 percent of the
children who are learning at grade levels this year.

For some groups, only 15 percent are reading at grade level
today.

We need to look at those numbers and we need to recognize
what they mean.

The sad and extremely important truth is that we have done almost
nothing as a nation in any intentional way in almost any settings to help each
of our children from all of our groups be learning ready before age four when
that ability and that capability are so important to their lives and to their personal
education success or failure.

Our beliefs on some of those issues were painfully,
dangerously and dysfunctionally wrong.

We used to blame our inability to close the learning gaps on
our schools.

Many people also blamed teachers for the fact that those
gaps in our schools have not closed.

That blame was misplaced.

Those gaps are not caused by either teachers or schools.

We now know that learning gaps we see in all of our schools directly
reflect the neuron connectivity levels that exist for each child in each of those
schools — and our schools and our teachers actually have nothing to do with
making those neuron connections in the brain for each child.

Instead of blaming teachers and schools for those learning
gaps, we need to support parents and families and communities in doing what we
need to do with each child to keep those gaps from happening in those key days,
weeks, months, and years. We need all parents and all families to know that all
children from all groups go through a basic biological process of brain
development and neuron connectivity in the first weeks, months, and years of
life.

We need everyone relevant to children to know that all
children go through the same basic processes in those same time frames — and
the impact of those processes on each child determine the life path for individual
learning and educational success of failure for each child — and we need to use
that information to create the right support levels for each child.

We need to set Learning Readiness by Age Four goals in every
school district and every community, and we need all of our relevant programs
for children in each community to help us achieve those goal in each setting.

We need to recognize how individual those processes are for
each child. Neuron connections are made for each child in a very individual
process that is tied directly to the direct interactions that happen directly
and personally in that time period for each child.

It is a very simple, very direct and very individual and very
personal process and we need everyone to know exactly what kinds of
interactions create those connections for each child

The process can be easy to do for both children and the
adults interacting with them.

We are clearly wired to learn to learn. Neurons are generally
very easy to connect in our children’s brains in ways that are triggered by
very basic interactions that we have in those time periods with each child because
our children tend to be eager to have those interactions with the adults in
their lives and love to have those interactions with the trusted adults in
their lives.

Children are neurologically predisposed to having those neuron
connections made. Simply talking to a child can actually create billions of
connections — and talking can be done in any setting by any relevant and
trusted adults with each child.

Talking Directly to a Child
Builds Billions of Neuron Links

Neuron connections create our learning reality for each
child and for every school and we now actually know how to make neurons connect.

Interactions are key.

Interactions are golden.

Basic interactions by adults with each child create neuron linkages
by the billions in those key weeks, months and years for each child and talking
is one of the very best interactions for causing neurons to connect.

We actually had people in positions of authority who gave us
bad information. Some people who were guiding parents taught that those very
first time periods in the life of each child were not important and some said
that those first months were almost entirely irrelevant for the brain
development and the learning ability levels for each child.

That was bad science. We had experts who did not think the
first months and years were important and they gave bad information to parents.
Many parents in a number of settings were even advised against having extensive
interactions with their children and grandchildren in the first weeks, months
and years of life.

A great many people have believed that education began at
kindergarten. Too many people believed that the times before kindergarten were
just place fillers for generic survival and general development.

That was wrong.

We now know that kindergarten is actually too late by several
years as the first and foundational step in the education process and learning
development process for each child. That process starts in the first weeks and
months of life for every child.

Neuron Connections — Built by
the Billions — and Not Kindergarten, Determine the Learning Readiness Levels for
Each Child

We now know that the brains of our children from every group
are ready for massive developmental opportunities at birth — and we now know
that the children from every group who have direct interactions with adults in
the very first months and years of life literally build billions and trillions of
neuron connections that will then serve each child for life.

The children who do not have those direct interactions with
adults in those weeks, months, and years of life do not have those connections
in their brains at that early point in their lives.

That neuron connection purging process that happens at age
four for each child was not known to the people who created and ran our
education world and our school systems. People believed that the opportunity to
build neuron connections in each child’s brain was the same at five years old and
ten years old and even at fifteen years old as it was at two years old.

That is, unfortunately, not true.

Kindergarten is a wonderful thing for children. Kindergarten
can add real value to their lives — but both kindergarten and pre-kindergarten
are too late to close those learning gaps for our schools because of the major
brain process changes that happen before age four for each of our children.

We should not be critical of anyone in our communities or in
our education system for doing so many things wrong in our efforts to close
those learning gaps for the past couple of decades. We did not understand those
brain developments and learning capability growth processes and time frames very
well until relatively recently, and so our educators did not change any of our
practices in our communities in ways that could help solve those problems
during that time frame.

When important components of medical science and when almost
all of our education theorists and practitioners and when our most relevant education
development theories and beliefs were also either wrong or completely ignorant about
the relative importance of those first months and years for the education
experience and the learning capabilities of each child, then we can’t expect
that parents, families, communities or even our teachers and our child care
workers would have somehow gotten the process and that science right.

We need everyone to know that science — and we need everyone
to also understand that the process is a very individual process for each
child.

Brain Development and Neuron
Connections Happen at an Individual Level for Each Child

We all need to understand how individual to each child that
process and reality is.

This is not a group process. That is an important point to
understand.

To change the future for our schools and our children, we
need to collectively and clearly understand that those neuron connection
processes happen individually for each child. They are not collective or group processes.
They happen individually, personally, situationally and directly in those key
months and years for each child.

We are sometimes confused by that particular point.

It does not happen by group.

It happens by child.

We do tend to measure and talk about the current learning
gaps in our schools by group. That measurement of current learning levels by
group can be useful at some levels — but it can also be an unfortunately
misleading measurement because the actual gaps we see are individual
measurements for each child. The processes of neuron connection building happen
individually for each child in those key months and years and neuron
connections do not happen for groups of children as groups.

When the learning level scores in our schools seem to
measure groups as they are generally reported, we need to know why that happens
and how to use that information.

We need to maintain an awareness and an understanding that
people from our various groups often have basic patterns of interactions in
their lives that can sometimes create similar neuron connection processes outcomes
for the children in their group — but those similar outcomes are actually a collective
measure of the similar interactions within a group for each child and they are
not a measure of the group itself at any level.

Neuron development could not be more individual for each child.
The interactions that happen for each child set up those neuron connections for
each child on a very individual basis.

The extremely high potential for children from each group to
make great levels of neuron connections in those key weeks, months and years at
the personal and individual level needs to be understood, appreciated and used
to help all children.

We Should Have Stars from
Every Group

We have the potential to do wonderful things for all children,
when we understand those opportunities.

We can create a nation of learning level stars from all
groups because that capability for star performance exists for children from
all groups and that potential to create learning stars from all groups directly
depends on children from all groups having the right sets of interactions as
individual children in those key weeks, months, and years of their lives.

We know from the new science that each child from every
group has a wonderful opportunity to build billions of and even trillions of neuron
connections in those first months and years — and we know exactly what we need
to do relative to interacting with each child to make those years very
beneficial for each child.

We need leaders from every group to support and enable
whatever processes are needed to teach this science to every family in their
group and to support having all children in their group being ready to learn at
age four. We have an extensive number of resources that can be used now to both
teach that information to leaders and to have leaders able to share the
information with their group.

Harvard is doing great work.

The Harvard Center for The
Developing Child is one of several great academic programs that have
been learning this information and are now sharing it with the rest of the
world. Harvard is taking a lead role on a wide range of child development
issues, and people going to their websites can be informed and taught at
extremely important levels.

Columbia, Stanford, The University of Washington, The
University of California at several sites, and a dozen other great research
programs are also all now focusing on the huge developmental potential for the
first weeks, months and years of life for each child.

We need that information from all of those great sites to
rise above those academic settings, and we need to use it to both guide
education policy for our cities, states and nation — and we need to use it to
help every family give the best start in life for every child.

The extremely important work by Dr. Beatrice Beebe and her
researchers at Columbia University on the importance of the first 100 days of
life for every child shakes up and completely re-educates all of the people in
both health care and education who believed that the first few months were
unimportant and even irrelevant from a developmental perspective for each
child.

Dr.
Beebe and her brilliant team can measure a child at 100 days old and
can predict with extreme accuracy which children will be in trouble and which
will be doing relatively well at three years, five years and even older.

What we know from all of those programs and from that
exploding body of great science is that neuron connections and the related
brain development in the first weeks, months and years of life are extremely
important for every child — and we now know with solid science and with extreme
and even painful clarity why we have failed in thousands of schools to close
learning gaps using approaches that focused on helping children when they are 15
years old.

Talking and Reading to
Children Create Neuron Links by the Billions

Now that we have that information and understand that
science — we need to use it to help every child.

We know how to make neurons connect for each child. We need
to use that information for every child.

We can finally end the learning gaps in our schools by doing
very basic things with our very young children. through family members, baby
sitters, caretakers, and other adults who interact with each child.

We know that just
talking to a child builds billions of neuron connections.

We know that reading to a child also builds billions of
neuron connections and also helps the brain understand symbolic and cognitive
meanings.

Counting is also a key development tool that can be done by
anyone in any setting. We know that simple basic counting with a child helps
build numerical capability that lasts each child for life.

We know that far too many children today have no one or almost
no one talking, no one reading, and no one counting with them in those first
key weeks, months, and years, and those children do not have the neuron
connections at age three that give them the foundation they need for successful
learning for all of their years in school.

Those children who do not have those connections end up
unable to read, and unable to function well in school and they are on the low
end of the learning gap in their learning levels at age fifteen.

We do not want that to happen.

So we need to put in place a very effective and useful
awareness program for all parents, and we need to use the tools that already
exist in many of our communities to provide that level of parenting support in
those first weeks, months, and years when it triggers billions of neuron
connections for each child.

We Can Use Medicaid to Help
Children Be Ready to Learn

We do not need to start from scratch in that effort or that
strategy as a country. We have a resource that we can use very quickly to help
us achieve our learning gap reduction goals.

We can fix a major part of that problem of our children not
being learning ready in an organized way as a country by repurposing and
rechanneling a functional reality that we now have for majority of our new
births in our country. We actually have a tool available that can be focused on
achieving that goal for most children being born in America today.

Medicaid is now the single largest program for supporting
births in America.

We can decide to use Medicaid to create learning readiness levels
for our children because more than half of the births this year in our nation will
be into our Medicaid program.

More than half of all mothers who give birth in America this
year will be Medicaid Mothers.

That very important and historic fact gives us a great
opportunity to help our children.

We can make learning readiness a Medicaid Priority. The
health benefits and the economic benefits of achieving that goal make it a
highly productive use of Medicaid resources.

We can start by making the whole issue of neuron
connectivity part of the knowledge base for American parents, because we know
that far too many mothers today do not know about the opportunity that exists
to connect neurons and strengthen baby brains.

A high percentage of Medicaid mothers do not know that
process now. That lack of awareness for those Medicaid mothers makes sense,
because we now know that most American mothers do not know the science
described in this proposal — and Medicaid mothers are not more likely than
other mothers to somehow be aware of those processes and opportunities.

We can use our Medicaid programs and Medicaid processes to
get information about neuron connection opportunities and tools to every mother
and every father and every family through the Medicaid caregivers and through a
new generation of well-designed Medicaid communications tools that can explain
and teach all parents the learning readiness processes that strengthen the
brain of every child.

Medicaid Should Support
Having 80 Percent or More of Children Learning Ready by Age Four

We should ask every community in America to make learning
readiness levels at age four a priority and a goal and we should use Medicaid
as a tool to help all communities achieve that goal.

. Far too many cities today have high rates of unemployment,
poor levels of learning functionality, and growing numbers of gangs and
incarceration rates that all can be reduced if those cities had higher
percentages of their children ready to learn when they were four years old. We
need enlightened and well-informed mayors to support that agenda, and we need
leaders from every group who want their group to do well to want their children
to have high levels of readiness to learn at that crucial age.

We need to make that a collaborative and universal set of
goals for all groups and settings. It would be good to have every community of
every kind involved in the process of having 80 percent or more of our children
to be ready to learn at age four.

We need to start with wisdom and a broad community awareness
of the impact of those processes on our children.

We want everyone to understand the opportunity that exists
for all of our children — and we need everyone to join us to help create better
lives for our children by having them all be ready to learn at age four.

People can do that by helping in various ways that are
relevant to their own lives and to the communities that they are part of.

Goal setting in each setting can help us all both understand
the process and create alignment and collaboration toward the goals.

We should set the very explicit and clear goal of having 80
percent or more of our children in every setting be learning ready by age four
— and we should ask every community and every school system in America to understand
why that is an important goal and to share in achieving that goal.

Eighty percent of children being ready to learn at age four is
a legitimate goal.

It is a stretch goal but it is a very attainable stretch
goal.

Currently, we have about 40 percent of our children who are learning
ready at kindergarten. That number reflects the average number of students who
are reading at grade level and who are doing mathematics at grade level at age 15
in our schools.

We should set a national goal of doubling that number. We
should make having 80 percent or more of our children learning ready by age
four be both a national priority and a target to be used by each community for helping
their own children.

Some groups do better than that now. That 80 percent goal is
entirely possible to do — because it is being done today. Canada has more than 80
percent learning readiness. Eighty percent would be a huge improvement over
where we are now on average as a nation — and it would be both attainable and
measurable in every community as a functional goal for community planning and
thinking.

Goals are good tools, because they help to structure
thinking and because they encourage collective and mutually supported activity
and involvement.

People will support a learning readiness goal when they
understand what it is and why it is important.

All parents and families want their children to do well in
life, so we should and will get significant family support in achieving that
agenda and goal when we explain it clearly.

Families want their children to have jobs and to stay out of
jail and to have good health. We should get solid support from families and
communities in both setting that goal and then doing the things we need to do
to achieve it.

People Can Do Things
Directly to Help Children Achieve That Goal

Some of the things that need to be done to have children be
learning ready are easy to do and can be done quickly in collaborative and
aligned ways in a wide range of settings.

We know that reading builds strong brains.

We need books everywhere.

Books are affordable, functional, available, and we can ask
each community to figure out how to get books to every family so that
children’s books are available for every child.

We can come up with multiple programs to make books and even
readers available to all children, if we set a goal for ourselves of having
children all have access to books.

We need trusted messengers to communicate that information
to all families — and we need to look at all of our existing child related
programs to see how we can add that learning readiness goal to their agenda and
thinking.

We have a number of good programs — like the WIC program
that provides very useful nutrition advice and health counseling to most
Medicaid mothers now — that can be expanded and partially repurposed to also
support learning readiness programs for the children they serve.

WIC is almost universal, well trusted, well-staffed, and can
be a perfect context for helping support improved readiness levels. WIC
programs can both encourage reading, and hand out books.

The nurse family partnership programs that exist now in many
communities can also be repurposed to add learning readiness formally to their
skill sets.

Early head start already helps with those agendas. The
regular Head Start program begins at age four after that prime neuron
development prime window of the first three years of life is over for children
— but early Head Start happens at very useful times for that process and can
give us great support in achieving that goal.

We need our relevant leaders in every setting and every
group on board.

We need mayors and governors and school superintendents and
school boards to all understand this science and to lead their communities in
achieving that 80 percent learning readiness goal by age four for their
children.

Achieving that goal for our children should be a universal agenda
and a shared process at multiple levels.

We should ask everyone in all settings to both help make it
happen and to support all children in achieving that goal.

We need creative thinking from all relevant people aimed at
achieving that learning readiness goal for our children in each setting.

We need to start with good information in each setting that
will give us benchmark information we can use to guide our thinking and measure
our progress. We can measure learning readiness percentages in each setting
today at age four — and then we can use that information to help us build the
plans we need in each setting to achieve that goal for all children.

We should help every child. In order to get 80 percent or
more ready to learn, we should try to provide support to every child in each
setting.

We can debate about whether or not we want to expend the
resources as communities or as a nation that will be necessary to achieve that
goal of helping every child in every setting — but we cannot debate whether or
not it is possible to achieve those numbers and whether or not we will be
better off as a society and a nation if we achieve those goals.

We know what to do to get every group of children to that
score or a higher one and we know that the children who are learning ready at
age four will make those learning gaps in our schools disappear because we know
now that those readiness levels at age four predict and create that performance
in our schools for those students at age fifteen.

Goal — 80 Percent of Four-Year-Olds
in Every Setting Learning Ready in Five Years

That goal is logistically and functionally possible to achieve.
We can actually make that goal happen in a significant number of settings in a very
immediate time frame because the things we need to do to achieve that goal involve
very direct and clearly understood processes and interactions for each child,
and because each setting and each community who makes that commitment has the
potential to put effective approaches in place very quickly to help make that goal
happen for their children.

All parents and all families want to help their children.

All parents and all families and all communities want their
children to succeed.

We can count on broad and extensive support for this agenda and
approach once everyone understands what it is and how much it can make lives
better for their children.

This is — at the most core level — a parenting opportunity.

Parents are key.

We need to help all parents and all families help all
children achieve those goals. We need to be creative and collaborative and
committed to helping our children achieve learning readiness and we need
parents to be key components of that process.

We need to look at each community and setting and we need
local leaders to figure out what set of tools and approaches can be done in
each setting to help each child in their community and group to achieve that
goal and then we need to help families by making the tools and support
processes available to each parent and family to help their children.

We also need each community to clearly understand the
remarkable new science that says the first 100 days of life are extremely
important for each child.

Children did not get support they needed from families and
communities those first months in some settings because some components of
medical science were unfortunately incorrect and wrong about the impact of
those first three months on the developmental reality for each child.

So we can’t blame parents who heard wrong information for
not doing the very best and most useful things for their own children in those
periods of time.

Those days of not understanding those processes or time
frames are gone, however, and the caregivers in our country have all learned
the new science.

We need all caregivers to teach that information to every
pregnant woman and to every new parent. Medicaid can support that process at
multiple levels.

We need every parent to understand both the importance of
the first months of life for getting the right start and the extreme importance
and opportunities of the first three years of life for neuron connection
activities in each child’s brain so that we have everyone supporting the things
we need to do to give the very best start as a child.

The new information about the first months of life needs to
be taught to parents and families before those months begin.

The new research also tells us that the children who have
the most stressful beginnings in those first months and years have a high level
of likelihood of acting out and behaving in angry and anti-social ways when
they get into school settings.

We actually suspended more children from kindergarten for
behavior problems this year in our country than we suspended from high schools.
Children who have a presumptive negativity mind set from their earliest
experiences when they get to school do not trust teachers or fellow students — and
we need to have a level of understanding for those students relative to how
difficult it is to have that negativity mind set at such an early age.

We can reduce that level of inter personal anger that we see
now from too many children at preschool and kindergarten by helping children
consistently have good, reinforcing, and affirming first weeks and first months
of life.

That can be done if we make teaching the most helpful
interaction approaches to mothers and fathers a priority for our doctors — and
for our Medicaid caregivers — in order to help families with the support they
need to help their children in those time frames.

We do need to change the tide of initial interactions for
many children or we will pay a heavy price from people who are never able to
fit in well in the most societal supportive ways.

If the situation in our schools continues to deteriorate, we
could have upwards of 70 percent of our students in a number of communities who
will be unemployable, angry, and leading lives of deep unhappiness, discouragement,
depression, despair, and growing anger that will manifest itself in a wide
variety of ways that will significantly weaken our future as a country and make
our communities hard places to live.

Health is also directly affected by all of these processes
and issues.

The health status of our high school dropout populations also
tends to be poor and personally damaging to the people with health conditions. Both
depression levels and chemical substance abuse are several times higher for the
people who have dropped out of school.

We can expect that those poor health situations will expand
as a problem in multiple communities when we have higher numbers of people who
go down those paths because they were not learning ready at age four and when
we add to those issues all of the functional and medical problems that result
from various levels of racial
and ethnic discrimination and disparities that happen too often in health care in
our community.

Our future as a country will be grim if we allow that set of
poor health outcomes to happen. Adverse
Childhood Experience (ACE) research tells us how much damage happens
to people’s lives when we have those kinds of difficult starts to our lives.

We Know What to Do to Have
Children Be Learning Ready

We were actually very wrong about several very important
things in developing our education policy and even our health care policy over
the past couple of decades. We need to recognize what those old errors in thinking
were, so that we do not repeat them today.

Most people believed that each child was born with a fixed
and pre-determined learning ability level — and most people believed that the
brain level ability that existed for each child at birth defined each child for
their entire life.

That belief could not have been more wrong.

We need everyone to understand the truth on that issue.

We need everyone now to know that we can and should make
major differences in the intelligence and learning ability levels of our
children — and we need everyone to know that we can grow strong brains for our
children by doing basic things in those first extremely important weeks,
months, and years for each and every child.

We need everyone to know that the neuron connectivity that
results from the direct experiences of each child in the first weeks, months, and
years of life actually builds the brain strength of each child and we need to
set up support plans for every child to help make that happen.

We need everyone to know that children from every group who
get direct interactions with adults in those time frames build neuron strength
that lasts for life. Children want those kinds of interactions to happen. We
now know from the excellent new brain science research that our very young
children from every group love having those interactions and love building
strong brains.

We need to make sure in our plans to increase the percentage
of children who are learning ready at age four that someone talks to every
child in each setting to build those connections.

Parents are the best first teachers and having parents
talking to every child is a wonderful thing to do. We also need to make sure
that when that is difficult or impossible for a parent to be the direct
interaction support at that point in time for a given child, that we have other
trusted adults doing those interactions and talking to each child in those
periods of time.

We need everyone relevant to children or to those processes to
know that just talking to a child actually builds billions of neuron
connections in the brain of the child.

The Process Always Happens
Individually for Each Child

The new science has taught us that this is an extremely
individual developmental process. The learning readiness process always happens
one child at a time.

That direct experience that happens for each child in those
key months and years makes the difference in neuron connections and in the learning
levels for each child.

Some of the data we are seeing about our learning gaps is misleading
on that point. We tend to show and report learning gaps by economic levels or
by racial and ethnic groups. We tend to measure the gaps in many settings by those
groups in ways that seem to indicate that we are reflecting some kind of group
performance with those numbers.

That is actually can be very misleading because the process
is entirely individual and it does not happen by group.

The learning levels that are being measured are actually not
a group reality or a group experience — or a group measurement of any kind. The
measurements reflect the individual performance of each child and reflect the
learning levels and learning readiness levels that are created by the
individual experiences of each child and not any group functionality.

Those learning gaps are also not directly economic.

Some reports and a growing number of opinion pieces make it appear that economic links or the economic status of people directly create learning levels and learning gaps. That belief can be unintentionally misleading. In the real world, there is no direct and actual physical link between any bank account or pile of cash and the number and existence of neurons in any child’s brain.

That direct functional link between the actual cash or
wealth in any family setting and the actual neurons in a child’s brain in their
family does not exist.

Learning readiness and learning capabilities in school for
children are very personal and individual measurements — and those measures
actually reflect the direct life experience and the neuron connection levels of
each child and they are not measures of any group reality or group performance
or of anyone’s individual economic status.

The direct life experiences of our children are influenced
in a number of ways by the group they are in and by the resources available to
each family — but the actual direct interaction experiences that create neuron
connections are specific to each child and the impact in learning levels
happens with each individual child.

That’s why we see children from every group who are stars — and
superstars — and why we see children from every group who are not doing well in
those areas. Their scores all reflect their own connectivity levels and their
scores as individuals do not measure their group.

Intelligence Levels Are Not
Set at Birth

Far too many people do believe — often very strongly — that
the intelligence levels for children are actually set at birth.

That is absolutely not true.

The basic belief that we all have our basic intelligence
levels pre-determined for each of us on the day we are born is extremely wrong.

In that same vein, the people who did not believe that we
could change the learning trajectory for any child in very significant ways were
also extremely wrong.

Learning levels and intelligence capabilities are created over
years by those neuron connections that are built in those first months and
years for each child and those neuron connections in each and every brain are
the direct result of the personal interactions that are experienced individually
by each child in those first weeks, months and years.

We need to create the best experience in those areas in
those time frames for every child.

Our strategy to have 80 percent or more of all children
learning ready by age four as a shared national goal should be to help every
child from every setting and every group have the kind of direct experiences
that cause billions of neurons to connect in their brains. The
Harvard Center for The Developing Child video on brain development
and their video on Serve
and Return interactions with children both show us the kind of
direct and responsive interactions that work to have those connections and
capabilities happen for each child.

Economic issues and economic status actually are highly
relevant to the process. Money does not create neuron connections in any brain
— but families who have more money can afford more books, and families with
more money can hire child support workers and can use child care settings where
the staff members are expected and trained to talk and read to their children.

Moderate-income families average 12 books per child, upper
income families tend to have dozens of books — but we have discovered that a
very high percentage of very low-income homes do not have a single children’s book.

That problem can be fixed. We can get books to everyone We need
to make that book disparity reality disappear in every setting very quickly — and
we can and should to do basic things in every community to help get books to
every child.

That is a very affordable and low-cost thing to do — and it
can be done in various ways in every setting to meet the needs of the low-income
parents in each setting.

We also need to use the resources we have available to make
sure that every child gets the kind of relevant support from their day care
settings that the higher-income families get now from their current day care
settings. Many day care settings for low income families do not have a single
book. That is also easy to fix.

We can also achieve a very useful goal of having day care
settings do a better job for the children they serve in broad ways relatively
quickly by using the licensing power we have relative to those services to
create expectations for those settings that support the learning readiness
goals in every community.

We can also get parents to be more effective purchasers of
day care services by getting the day care sites and workers to have and use
books.

We can and should set standards and expectations for day
care that support the neuron connectivity needs of all of our children. We need
all of the day care people who care for our children to personally know and understand
the basic brain development processes that happen in the first weeks, months,
and years of life — and we need to encourage and enable people talking and
reading to our children in all of those settings to help neuron connectivity
happen for those children.

Families who understand the brain development process are
likely to be better informed and more demanding customers for the day care
settings in ways that improve their performance as day care providers as well.

We particularly need to help low-income families.

Being a parent is much more difficult without money.

Low-income mothers with two jobs and sometimes uncertain
places to live can have extremely difficult time finding the opportunity to
have direct talking and reading and interacting time with their children. We
need to do everything in our power to help every mother understand those
opportunities to help build neuron connections in her child’s brain — and we do
need to figure out ways in every community to use programs like early head start,
WIC, Nurse Family Partnerships, and various community reading programs and day
care settings to help low-income families get that neuron connectivity time for
their children.

We need every community to understand and support that
opportunity to help every child and we need to do helpful things in every
setting using the available tools to help all of our children get the right
start.

We need to strongly support breast feeding for at least a
couple of months for every child as a key and extremely useful part of that
process. Breast feeding has very high value for each child at multiple levels.

We need to completely abandon the old belief that education
begins at kindergarten.

Many people in many settings have believed that to be true
for a long time. We know from some of the new research that some families have
held off on getting books to their children before their kindergarten years
because of that belief.

We need every family and every community to more past that
belief and to appreciate and enjoy the fact that learning starts in the cradle
at birth and we need to have talking, interacting, and reading happening for
every child at the earliest possible levels. We clearly need to begin at birth
with each child and we need to have direct and supportive interactions with
each child in the first days and weeks of life.

Having great kindergarten for every child is a good thing to
do. We do want great kindergartens for our children — and we also need to
recognize that we cannot close our learning gaps in our high schools if we wait
for the kindergarten or for pre-kindergarten years before trying to make that
happen.

We need to make having children be learning ready before age
four our first priority. We can still want great kindergarten for every child
because the children who are learning ready when they get to kindergarten can
thrive and prosper in those learning settings.

We also want great grade schools and high schools that help
every child.

Our schools will have a much higher level of performance and
our teachers will have a different and better personal teaching experience when
more of their students are learning ready. That higher level of learning
readiness will also save money in most schools, because the most expensive and the
highest maintenance students and the students with the highest levels of health
problems and with the highest medical expenses tend to be the ones who were not
learning ready.

We can both transform schools and we can significantly
improve the health of our communities when fewer people are dropping out of
school by having higher levels of learning readiness for our children at age
four.

The number of children in our communities who are being born
into the groups at the low end of those learning level scores is significantly
increasing. The likelihood of having increased and damaging numbers of very
specific Adverse Childhood Events — or ACES — can be significantly reduced by
having better interactions between parents
and children in those first months and years of life. The
impact of ACES on young children not only changes health — it changes
incarceration rates.

Some Groups Are Only 20
Percent or Less Learning Ready Now

We clearly need individual communities to take on this issue
for the people they serve.

We need to recognize the reality there are several major
communities with very low learning scores where the number of children who are
learning ready at kindergarten today is between 20 and 30 percent and the
number of children being born into those groups with low levels of readiness is
increasing.

Twenty-eight percent of the Hispanic families in that county
did read several books each week to their children, and those Hispanic families
who read those books regularly actually had three times as many of their
children learning ready by kindergarten as the Hispanic families who did not
read books to their very young kids in that county.

Similar success stories exist in a high number of settings
where early reading programs are put in place. Children love books, and
families tend to love reading. Neurons connect by the billions when books are
read to children. The impact is significant and the parenting interactions that
occur during the reading process reduce stress for both parents and children at
the same time that their learning levels increase.

We can and should use that information about the specific
sets of interactions that build neuron connections to help children in every
community and setting.

We should have people in every community who look at each
child to help change the futures for our children by changing the way they
interact with the world in the first months and years of life in direct and
intentional ways.

That Knowledge Creates
Accountability for Us All at a Deep Ethical Level

Knowledge about those issues and those opportunities very
directly triggers a combination of ability, capability and accountability for
everyone who knows that information.

Now that we know that science and that basic brain
development information, we have an ethical and moral obligation and an ethical
imperative to use it to help children who are being born today.

We also have a massive and clear economic and functional
incentive, imperative and obligation to apply that science to our nation’s
children in the first weeks, months, and years of life to allow us to succeed
in the future as an economy and a nation.

We also have an obligation at a basic ethical level to use
that information to remedy and help both address and redress some of the key
economic, educational, and health care disparities that we have with us today as
a nation.

We have a long history of discrimination by group in this
country — and we should respond to that history of discrimination and both
economic and functional disparities now by doing the right things today to give
children from every group the best possible start in order to enable more
people from more groups to achieve the very best parts of the American Dream.

We are on bad paths for both education and inter group
discrimination in a couple of key areas now.

We have more people in prison than any country in the world
by a wide margin — literally imprisoning seven times more people per capita
than Canada. That is relevant to our learning readiness at age four goals and
agenda because the undisputed and irrefutable reality is that the majority of
people in our prisons can’t read.

We disproportionately imprison minority Americans, and we also
very disproportionately imprison people from every group who cannot read well
and who have dropped out of school.

Those numbers were pointed out earlier. More than 60 percent
of the African American males in their 30s who have dropped out of high school
are in jail today. By contrast, roughly 10 percent of the African American
males who have graduated from high school are in jail today.

Sixty percent of a group being in prison today is a much
higher and more damaging number than 10 percent being in jail.

Both numbers are bad. One number is criminally bad.

The important thing we all need to recognize and understand today
about all of those incarcerated people is that we can actually now tell before
age four which path each of those prisoners was on.

We could have known with more than 80 percent accuracy by
age three which of those students were going to drop out of school and end up
on that path to prison.

We can know that number about future inability to read and about
dropping out of school with a high degree of certainty before age four because
we now understand the brain science and the developmental time frames that set
up learning readiness that apply to every child.

People who drop out of school make up the overwhelming
majority of the children involved in the juvenile justice system and drop outs
from all groups are much more likely to go to jail.

That situation linking prison time and learning readiness
before age four is not unique to our country. We have far more people per
capita in prison, but when you look at who goes to jail in other countries,
similar patterns exist. Sixty percent of the people in English prisons cannot
read and more
than 80 percent of the prisoners in Scottish jails can’t read.

In each of those countries, people who cannot read have a
hard time finding a job and the people who do not have jobs are more likely to end
up using crime as a source of income.

We have important data about learning gaps and learning
readiness by community that should be guiding our thinking. Only 12 percent of
the children in Michigan are now entering kindergarten learning ready. More
than three-fourths of those children in that school system are not ready for
kindergarten today. That means that at least three fourths of those students in
Michigan will not be reading well or doing computations at grade level when
they get to high school.

Those children in those Michigan schools will have a very
hard time being employed when they are adults when they can’t read or do basic
calculations.

Chicago has a national reputation for having a
disproportionate number of murders happening. When you look at the actual data,
we can see that ninety percent of the murders in Chicago were done by gang
members — and we can also see that ninety percent of the gang members were high
school drop outs.

We see that same basic pattern that ties back to low
learning readiness levels in state after state. Look at the learning and
computation levels for any state in the federal learning readiness reports to
get a sense of how universal the problem is.

If we continue on the path we are on in those settings, we
will continue to have extremely low numbers of children from several of our
groups graduating from high school with the right learning abilities to do well
in either employment or higher education, and we will have twice as many people
in in all of those settings in the functional situation of not being employable.

This could and should be a much more positive situation for
us as a country at this point in our history. We now have much better tools for
helping children.

The actual neuron developmental opportunities that exist for
all of our children in every setting are immense and wonderful. Every child is
a major possibility for direct success and for having a much better life than
the one they will have without those neurons being connected.

The new science is showing us that it is actually It is
possible to do extremely beneficial things with almost every single child. We
can do wonderful things for almost all children with very basic interactions at
those key points in time and we can do it in ways that permanently changes the
futures for people and families.

We know these approaches work to change children’s lives
because it is happening every day and it clearly works for many millions of
children.

We have a subset of our children in all settings right now who
are being spoken to, read to, and who get direct interactions with trusted adults
daily — and those children with that level of support in all of those settings are
doing extremely well.

We currently have the highest SAT scores in our history for
some of our children. That high level of ability happens for some children because
the brains blossom and the neuron connections almost explode when the children
get the right stimulation at the right point in time — and we now know from the
new research programs that our children who get that stimulation in those high
opportunity first weeks, months and years of life love getting it.

We Know what happens for the children who do not have those
interactions. They have very different learning levels at age four and they
have very different levels of health and functionality at age 12 than the ones
who do get them.

The Learning Gaps in Each
School Were Not Caused by the Schools

We now know that the learning gaps are caused by neuron
linkage differences from the first years of life for each child — and we know
that they are not caused by our schools. But even though that insight is confirmed
by our newly known brain development science, the truth is that we should have all
at least suspected that reality about the schools not creating the gaps we have
been seeing for all of those years to be true earlier just by looking at what
was actually happening in the schools.

Basic logic is relevant to that assessment. When there are
multiple sets of students in the same schools who all have the same teachers,
the same desks, the same books, the same classroom hours, and the same
curriculum, and when we see that there are significant learning gaps between
sets of students in each of those schools where everything relevant and
functional in the schools was the same for all of the children, then we could
have figured out and known that the learning gaps in those settings were functionally
not the fault of the schools or the teachers because the key specific factors about
the education situation in all of those settings were the same for every child from
every group in each school.

Teachers are key to the learning process and to the
education reality for each child and we need to do everything we can to help
teachers be successful in helping their students in all of our schools.

We need teachers who know how to deal with all children in
each setting regardless of their learning readiness. We need teachers to
understand and deal with the issues of bias and unconscious bias and all of the
damages that those issues can cause when they exist.

We also need to do everything we can to help the children
who have fallen behind to catch up as much as they each can in each setting. We
need our schools to be a haven and a resource for every child — and we need to
maximize the number of children who learn well in our school settings.

Age Four Learning Readiness Is
Key and Should Be a Top Priority for Us as a Nation

If we do not want to become a nation that is significantly
and dangerously increasing the millions of people who have only marginal and
weak computation and reading and cognitive skills as adults, then we need to
understand the science of brain development in those first weeks, months, and
years of life and then we need to do effective things in every community, every
family, and every setting to give supportive starts for every child from every
group to have them all be learning ready at age four.

We could easily achieve that goal.

We are a very wealthy nation. We have vast resources that we
could apply in a wide range of cost effective, intentional, targeted and
focused ways to help every child as a high return investment as a country. We
have enough money to help every child, if we figure out a path that has us look
at each child from birth with that goal in mind.

We know every birth. We can put in place resources though
each community that keeps track of the strategy for every child — and we can
anchor that path for our Medicaid births with programs built into Medicaid to
do that work. We can and could and should very intentionally, wisely and
effectively give ourselves a future where all of our children are on the right
side of that learning gap at age four and beyond and we will find that to be an
extremely high return for our money.

Multiple economists have run the numbers. The return on that
investment is guaranteed and it is massive and it is very fast because the
better health and lower education cost rewards kick in very quickly.

It makes very strong economic sense to invest in our
children — because our economic future as a country will be far better if we
have graduates who are employed and become taxpayers instead of drop outs who
will not pay taxes and who will have major health care problems and who will
spend significant time in prison.

Katharine
Stevens at the American Enterprise Institute has pointed out the clearly
practical logistical need for us to help children in those first years of life
in order to have a workforce in the future. We need workers who can work or we
will need to have our work force needs met overwhelmingly by immigrant workers
who can read and do calculations.

Aaron
Sojourner, at the University of Minnesota, has shown the massive
economic return that can happen and explains the more productive overall
population that can be created by a relatively high cost intervention in the lives
of our lowest income children.

The economists all agree that we should spend the money in
order to have future tax payers, future workers, and students who can enter
into multiple lines of work because they have very high capability levels — and
the return on investment will be a multiple of the money we spend.

If we do not make that investment, we will have tens-of-millions
of nonreaders and we will have people in gangs and in prison because their life
trajectory doesn’t lead them to employment or education.

That is not a hard set of choices. We should have people of
every political persuasion on board with that agenda because our future success
and even safety as a country depends on it.

Knowledge Is Extremely
Empowering

We need to begin by giving the power of clear knowledge to
mothers and fathers and families as soon as we can about these issues and
processes.

We need to start by teaching the science and the basic brain
development and learning ability strengthening process and brain exercise paradigm
in clear and basic ways to every mother and every father and to every family
and every community.

Far too many parents do not know that process or do not understand
those opportunities when their children are born.

When First Five in California did a study of California
Medicaid parents four years ago, they discovered that fewer than 10 percent of
the Medicaid mothers knew at that point in time that they could exercise the
brain of their child and strengthen the brain. Almost everyone believed that
intelligence for each person was determined at birth — and almost all of those
parents believed that every child was simply going to have the brain strength
for life that was predestined for each child just by being born.

All mothers love their children — and the reaction from the
mothers to being told that interacting with their baby in those first months
and years could significantly strengthen the brain — and that talking, reading,
and even singing to each baby could build billions of neuron connections for
each child, was extremely positive. Both mothers and fathers loved hearing that
message. The reaction from the parents could not have been more positive.

All parents and families want their children to do well and
to be healthy, smart, and happy with their lives. Parents want the best lives
for their children. We can build on that desire and that love of parents for
their children and we can teach that wonderful brain science and those very
basic and highly useful brain building tools to everyone relevant to our
children in ways that will increase the likelihood of each child benefiting
from that knowledge.

We are blessed today with an explosion of knowledge from an
exploding number of sites of learning about these issues.

We need to appreciate how many great academic programs are
working on those issues and making us considerably wiser and smarter on all of
those opportunities with a rapidly expanding base of knowledge.

UCLA did supporting work on relative brain size in very
early years based on learning trajectories for each child and pointed out the
lifetime differences in brain sizes that happen when children do not get that
support in those key years.

The grim data reinforces itself. We can wish it was not true
— but wishing that it wasn’t true does not weaken the damage done to children
who do not get the support that we need children to have in those weeks, months
and first years.

We Need Parental Leave Time to
Become Neuron Connection Time

Now that we understand that science, we need to have people
who run our legislatures and our governments using it to guide public policy.

As one example, we should now think of parental leave support
in a different context. We need to make parental leave function as part of that
neuron development process for having children be learning ready at four years
old.

That new science gives us a whole new case and a whole new
strategy and function and reason to advocate for parental leave after births
and it also gives us excellent new tools to use in much more effective ways with
parents who take a parental leave at that high opportunity time in the life of
their child.

We now have a solid scientific reason to change our policy in
all states to both give our children the best possible start and to save
massive money over time for our schools, our health care system, and even our
prison system, by using parental leave to get the right interaction and neuron
development start for every child.

We need both parental leave opportunities for parents and we
need the people who take that leave who know what kinds of direct and
responsive interactions with their child in that time frame will provide the
most value and structural and long-term benefit to their own child.

We Need WIC and Early Head
Start and Nurse Partnerships to Help Parents Help Children

We need the Medicaid obstetricians and Medicaid
pediatricians and the related nurse support teams to be teaching this
information to every mother even before the baby is born.

We need a plan for each mother. We need a plan for each
child.

Those are not impossible to do. We can use computer support
tools to help make those plans happen.

We should use the full sets of tools we have in very
intentional ways to support those plans.

We should include in that plan tool kit both the WIC food
support program coaching teams that help most Medicaid mothers now and the
nurse family partnership teams and the next generation of nurse support
services that we have now in many settings to help with that teaching and that work.

We also need to use our Early Head Start processes widely
and well. Head Start is a great program but it starts after three years old and
doesn’t tend to close learning gaps. Early Head Start can begin at birth and
should be directed to make learning readiness at age four a major priority.

Extending all of those programs into improving learning
readiness levels for children before age four can create some expense — but multiple
economists have shown us that the positive economic payback from having more children
be more learning ready is almost immediate and huge.

Even if the economic issues did not support that agenda, we
have safety issues for our communities that should push us to helping every
child into a future of employment and not crime. We have major gang problems in
multiple cities that are growing worse — and we need to remove the inability to
find other employment because of reading deficiencies as a major reason for
people to join gangs.

Learning Gap Closure Is Like Introducing Polio Vaccine to Health Care at Age Four

Polio actually offers us a lesson we should learn about
helping our children learn.

We can learn a lesson from health care about their response
to polio as a community problem.

Polio is a horrible disease that did a lot of damage and
created a lot of pain and anxiety for many people for many years. We responded to
that disease as communities and as caregivers in the best ways that we knew to
deal with the damage and the fear. The primary approach that was used by health
care practitioners for many years for the disease of Polio involved many after-the-fact
supports, tools, damage repair responses and various functional remediations
for the people who were damaged by the disease.

Care organizations invented respirators, and walkers and
iron lungs for their polio patients. Those wonderful, creative, innovative, highly
functional and often very expensive tools each helped each damaged person who
used them but they actually did nothing about the actual disease.

Then health care came up with a vaccine.

Instead of just repairing and remediating damage done to our
people by that horrible disease, we invented a tool and approach that actually
prevented the disease and we made it a major national public policy priority to
vaccinate everyone against that disease.

The vaccine and a clear, intentional and effective massive
public health commitment and plan to use it on behalf of everyone in the
country was a far better approach than iron lungs for America.

The vaccine went upstream in the process and it did a high
impact intervention with each person that prevented the disease from happening
for most people and completely changed and improved the health care world for
polio as a disease.

We can and should use that same strategy and that same basic
model and mind set for our schools and for our learning gaps. We need to go
upstream in the process of learning ability for each child. We should not just
do damage control and after the fact remediation for the people who cannot read
and who have dropped out of school.

We need a vaccine.

We need a vaccine equivalent tool for those learning gaps,
incarceration rates, and economic disparities in our country that are driven by
major differences in education and learning levels for our people to keep those
gaps and those damages from happening.

Closing the learning readiness gaps for all children by age
four in America as a priority for all communities in this country can be that
vaccine.

It would be a huge mistake for us not to figure out how to
do the right thing in all of those settings to help children in every setting and
functionally change the trajectory of those damaging realities for our children
and our communities.

We understand the vaccine that exists that can actually end
the learning gaps in our schools by preventing them from happening.

The new science that is being developed and refined by
brilliant researchers in multiple settings has given us the tool kit that we
need. We know exactly what can make that change to keep those learning gaps
from damaging our children.

We now know what to do for each child. We know what interactions
change lives relative to learning issues and capabilities for each child — and
we know when and how to do each of the things that have huge impact on each
child.

We now need leaders in every setting for every group who agree
to remedy that learning gap deficiency in all of our schools and who create
that reality and who share that understanding level about how to prevent that
learning deficiency with the people they serve and lead and then we need to
save our kids by making sure all of our kids are learning ready at age four.

We can break the cycle of learning deficiencies for growing
numbers of people that threatens to break us and damage us as a country and as
communities if we don’t prevent it from happening. We also need to avoid
unintentional damage to our children.

We now know what we can do to help every child be learning
ready at age four. We should both be basically ashamed of ourselves as a
society if we do not do it and we should be very happy with ourselves for doing
things that help make that better future happen in any setting.

We Can Actually Each Change a
Life

We also all need to recognize, remember, know, understand,
and appreciate that this process happens one child at a time and we can each
use that knowledge to change a life.

Even if we do not each do the things we need to do right now
to help large numbers of children be more learning ready by age four, each of
us reading this information should know that we can each change a life by personally
and directly getting this information to one family who would not know this key
information about the neuron connectivity potential in those first weeks,
months, and years for their child if you did not share it with them.

Once you teach them this information, it can change their
paradigm about what is possible for their child, and they can use it to build
brain strength for their child. Each family with a young child who gets that
information can use it to change the life of a child.

You can get that information to them and you can change a
life.

What else can you do today to change the trajectory of a
life in extremely positive and beneficial ways?

Figure out someone in the world who will benefit from this
information and share it with them.

We can actually change the trajectory of a life in hugely
important ways by simply doing that one thing.

Do it if you can. Talk to someone relevant to a new birth or
a very young child and teach this opportunity and process.

The Most Important Number in
America Is Learning Readiness at Age Four

The most important thing to do is to help create a learning
readiness goal for each community and for us as a country.

You are invited to be part of that effort, movement, and
agenda.

We need to make having 80 percent or more of our children be
learning ready at age four a major priority for our communities and for our nation.
There are several good measures of learning readiness that can be used to
measure how ready our children are. Each community should choose the readiness measurement
tool that works best for them. Sonoma
and Cleveland
and Omaha
and a number of other enlightened communities are going down those paths to
some degree now and they have begun to make progress in key areas.

The readiness measurement is useful, but it is not the most
important part of that strategy. The most important part is to actually put
support in place for each child.

We need every community to be working on those issues — because
every community has children being born this year who will benefit from that
support — and we need every community to figure out the combination of supports
that will help their children.

It is entirely possible for each setting to put workable and
effective programs and both education and support processes in place to help
every child get the right start because we now know that it is possible to do.

At an individual level, each child we save is a child we
save — and saving even one child is a beautiful thing because that child will
avoid the misery, depression, incarceration levels, and poor health that too
often result from not having that neuron connection support in those key weeks,
months and years of life.

On a much broader level — but not necessarily higher level —
the economic reasons for going down that path to learning readiness are
overwhelmingly positive.

All of the return on investment (ROI) studies reach the same
uncontestable conclusion.

The economic and ethical and functional needs, advantages,
and benefits for us to have as many children as possible learning ready at age
four are massive and irrefutable.

We also need to do it in order to have any possible chance
of achieving inter group Peace.

We will be deeply damaged as a country and our children and our
grandchildren will live in a divided, angry, dangerous and dysfunctional world
if we do not do the right things now to help children from every group get on
the right and effective track for their learning readiness levels before age
four.

Every community should set those learning gap closure goals
— and then every community should do effective things to close them. Instead of thinking about education as being K-12 — we
need to think of education as being B-C — Birth to College.

We need a collective effort to make those gaps disappear — and
that collective effort needs to be anchored in the science and supported by our
understanding that every group will be damaged and our country will have a very
grim future if we do now achieve those goals.

The choice is ours.

Let’s make the right choice.

Please — if this entire perspective and context for the
future of our children makes sense to you — then share this idea and share this
proposal with someone who you think should both understand it and help make it
happen.

Ask any relevant leader of your community — your town or
family or organization or group — to set this goal for your people and help
make all children ready to learn when they are four years old.

That strategy can benefit every group who uses it for their
children to have high levels of learning readiness at age four — and we will
benefit collectively when we have people succeeding and not acting out of anger
to keep other people from benefiting from their success.